A Christmas story for you, by Pippa Goodhart

After thirteen years of being a regular contributor to this lovely Picture Book Den, I've decided that this will be my last regular post here. What should my last post be? It's landing at Christmas, so I give you a gift of a story about giving. It's a story intended for a picture book, but which has yet to find a publisher who wants it. I hope you enjoy it -

  

What Can I Give?

 

One morning my phone goes - Bleep-bleepety-bleep!

It’s Mole.

‘Hello, Moley, how are you?’ 

Mole just sighs and says nothing.

‘Shall I come and see you?’ I ask. 

‘Yes please, Rabbit,’ says Mole. 

‘I’ll bring you a present to cheer you up,’ I tell her. 

But I haven’t got a present. What can I give her?  

 

I think of Mole in her gloomy dark hole. 

I want to give Mole colours! 

 

So I stitch-stitch a quilt to wrap-hug Mole up in sky blue, leaf green, berry red.

‘I think she’ll like this!’

 

But, as I set off to Mole’s hole home, I see Badger, and Badger is shivery-quivery cold.

What shall I do? 

What would you do?

 

I give the quilt to poor cold Badger.

‘Thank you, kind Rabbit,’ says Badger.

I’m glad that Badger’s warm, but now what can I give sad Mole? 

Perhaps I can give her some fun.

 

So, I make a toy for Mole. 

I make a fine little boat to float in Mole’s bath; a boat for her to play with. 

I know that she’s waiting for me, so I must hurry to take it to her.

 

But, as I scurry along the path, I see Mouse. Poor little Mouse is gulp-sniff-sobbing.

‘Oh dear, Mouse, what’s the matter?’

‘I got left behind,’ sniffs Mouse. ‘And now I can’t catch up with my friends, and it’s getting late, and I don’t know what to do-oo-oo! Boo hoo!’

‘Oh.’ I look at the little boat I’d made for Mole. 

What shall I do? What would you do?

 

‘Would a boat that could float you down the river help?’ I ask.

‘Oh, yes please, kind Rabbit!’ says Mouse.

So, Mouse floats away in the boat to catch up with his friends. 

But now what can I give Mole?

I haven’t got time to go home and make anything new. All I can do is to collect pretty things as I go along the path. So, I make a bouquet of twigs and leaves and berries to bring beauty into Moley’s home. 

 

But just as I am about to knock on Mole’s door, I see Hare, bounding along the path. 

She sees my bouquet, and she says, ‘Oh, my goodness gracious me, is that big bouquet all for me? How did you know it was my birthday today? Hooray! Thank you so much, kind Rabbit!’

So, of course, I give Hare the bouquet.

 

And now I have nothing to give to my friend Mole, nothing at all. But I’d promised to give her a present! Shall I just creep away, and come back again another day? 

What would you do? 

Uh-oh, oh no, Mole has seen me!

 

‘Come in!’ calls Mole. 

So that’s what I do. 

I tell Mole about trying to bring her colours, making a quilt, and meeting a shivery Badger. I tell about trying to bring her fun, with the boat that was needed by lost little Mouse. I tell about the bouquet that made Hare birthday-happy. 

‘So, I’m sorry, dear Mole, but I have nothing to give you after all. Nothing. Nothing, at all.’

‘That’s not true!’ laughs Mole. ‘You have brought me a story full of lovely things. I love stories.’

That gives me an idea. ‘Shall we make the story into a book?’

 

So, together, Moley and I make the story into a book. 

‘The perfect present!’ smiles Mole. ‘Thank you, kind Rabbit.’  

And her smile is the perfect present for me. 

 

My hope was that this, as a book, could look as if its hand-written, and could perhaps include what look like scrapbook additions of scraps of quilt fabric and winter flowers etc, thus appearing to be the book they make at the end of the story.

 

Pippa Goodhart

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas!

PS My You Choose Christmas, beautifully illustrated by Nick Sharratt, is newly out in paperback:

A

 

 

How to Imagine a Picture Book World • By Natascha Biebow

The World's A Wonderful Place If You Can Only Visualize It!

When children are young, their actual world is relatively small and they are just beginning to grasp what the wider world looks like. Day-to-day revolves around home, routines, family, the neighbourhood, nursery and preschool, and everyday tasks and celebrations. Yet young children have vivid imaginations with almost unlimited scope. From just under a year, their pretend play takes off and they soon start to play with props and people around them as if they were real. 

 

         

Enriched pretend play helps young children develop empathy and social skills, learn new concepts, gain confidence and independence, understand how the world works, and improve motor skills.

 

When children see the possiblities in books, this can both validate their imaginative play and serve as a springboard for new ideas.

 

In picture books, writers and illustrators can do just about anything as long as the internal logic is sound.

 

Pairing seemingly random characters and objects together create such interesting, fun and compelling worlds.

 

A bucket portal into an ocean world? Yes!

 

From Billy's Bucket by Kes Gray and Garry Parsons

 

Or even a bucket that is full of dinosaurs – didn’t you know?

 

From Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs Go to School by Ian Whybrow and Adrian Reynolds

Dragons that wear underpants. Of course!

 

 

From Dragons Love Underpants by Claire Friendman and Ben Cort

A Tiger who drinks all the water in the tap – certainly.

 

From The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr

A dragon who scarfs tacos?

 

 

From Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin

A generous witch with room for everyone on her broom . . .

 

From Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler

 

A boy who can sail alone to the land of the monsters and be King . . .

From Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

 

A seed who is bad (but doesn't mean to be)?

 

From The Bad Seed by Jory John and Pete Oswold

Cows that type and Ducks that negotiate. . .

 

From Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin

 

Crayons that rebel . . .

 

From The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt

 

A pigeon who wants to drive a bus . . .?

 

From Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems

 

A snowdog that can fly! 

From the Snowman and the Snowdog based on the characters created by Raymond Briggs

EVERYTHING is possible!

 

Imaginative play is empowering and fun. And it’s a great excuse to just PLAY.

 

What book world will you create? Where will you go and who will be there?

 

_________________________________________________________________

 

  Natascha Biebow, MBE, Author, Editor and Mentor

 

  Want to level up your picture books? I am launching a new  online picture book course!

  Natascha is the author of the award-winning The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons, illustrated by Steven Salerno, winner of the Irma Black Award for Excellence in Children's Books, and selected as a best STEM Book 2020. Editor of numerous prize-winning books, she runs Blue Elephant Storyshaping, an editing, coaching and mentoring service aimed at empowering writers and illustrators to fine-tune their work pre-submission, and is the Editorial Director for Five Quills. Find out about her picture book webinar courses! She is Co-Regional Advisor (Co-Chair) of SCBWI British Isles and was awarded an MBE for her services to children's book writers and illustrators. Find her at www.nataschabiebow.com

 

Non-fiction that makes you feel (with Mini Grey)

Non-fiction books are sometimes seen as factual, and not emotional. But I think this is far from the truth, and in this post I’m going to have a look at a few non-fiction books, and consider how they make us feel. 

 

The Klaus Flugge Prize is awarded to debut picture book illustrators. Winning an award like this is exactly the spotlight you need when you’re just starting in picture books. A non-fiction book had never won before, but this year it did, with Kate Winter’s The Fossil Hunter. It’s the story of Mary Anning. And it shows that a non-fiction book can have powerful visual story-telling.

I was lucky enough to have a chat with Kate at an online event with the brilliant Just Imagine.  She showed us the sketches of Mary that had guided her making of the story. Mary often is holding a light, and I think Mary looking hard and shining a light into the past might be an important theme of the book.

A Mary Anning sketch by Kate Winter

Another sketch by Kate

 To me, the illustrations in The Fossil Hunter are about capturing the light and the moment and the feel – of what Mary Anning is experiencing. 

 There’s a looseness in the style of the pictures – they’re not too detailed, not pinned down, gestural, slightly unresolved – so that your imagination has space to fill in. 

Work-in-progress stages by Kate of an image from The Fossil Hunter

 If these pictures were more photographic, more realistic – we wouldn’t have that space to project onto them. The figure of Mary is often the only woman – alone, resolute, but also looking into a vivid vanished world. 

Scattered through The Fossil Hunter are gatefold pages. The gatefold is an opening to a whole new world hidden beneath. Under the gatefold there’s a hidden layer, waiting to be discovered.

  Sometimes the gatefold is a door into past worlds that are an explosion of colour, with Mary exploring. 

 The gatefold is a way to physically dip into the past, into a layer of parallel worlds, as Mary imagines the past, millions of years ago.

It’s also a way to open a book of wonder, a cabinet of treasures.  

Sometimes fossils in shale can be like treasures hidden within the leaves of a black book, waiting for you to be the first creature to see them since they were buried in the mud, millions of years ago. 

Here is Mary gazing into the unknown, again with her light to see further, to uncover secrets. The pictures are enabling us to feel Mary’s wonder.

 

In Rob and Tom Sears’s book The Biggest Footprint, all of humanity gets smooshed into one giant human, 3 km high. 

They said about making it: “We started out with a weird thought experiment: what if, instead of 8 billion humans, there was just one, colossal mega human, smooshed together from all of our mass? How big would we be? What would we be like, and what sort of mischief would we get up to?”

This book is about getting an idea of the scale of our impact on the planet. Numbers in the millions are really hard for us humans to get our heads round, but this book tries to present this visually, comparing numbers and sizes, always with something shown for scale, so we can start to build the perspective to see what we’re up to as a species. 

At the start there’s a huge crowd of 8 billion people – what are they queuing for? It turns out, it’s to go in the smooshing machine. 

And what comes out of the smooshing is a huge blue bemused mega-human.  

The mega-human isn’t deliberately bad, but it’s clumsy and not really aware of how powerful it is. 

For scale, all the wild tigers there are in the world (less than 4000) get smooshed into a 44 metre tiger. It bounds out of the smooshing machine, a stripey flash, looking pretty big perched on the Taj Mahal…

 

 ...but then it fits easily on the thumbnail of the megahuman.

 

We get to compare the 3 km height of the megahuman with the smooshed mega giraffe (size: up to the ankle) The unbelievable scale of what we’ve done to our planet in the last 100 years is shown by the changing sizes of the mega-animals. 

  Finally our mega-human  meets all-the-humans-who-have-ever-lived, and then a mega-creature who is All-Life-On-Earth, both of them increasingly enormous – but not as big as the monstrous ball that is Everything-On-Earth-Made-By-Humans. And now I’m feeling dizzy with the perspective – the human-made world is now more massive than the living one. 

In this picture the small figure talking is All-The-Humans-Who-Have-Ever-Lived, the Mega-human is the teeny blue blob to the left of them.

  The scale of our impact is incredible. The people of Earth are producing stuff (concrete, metal, tarmac etc) every week that is equal to their collective bodyweight. 

 

 In these final spreads all the people of Earth have been de-smooshed – (this could have been a good gatefold!) How it makes us feel is an important factor – we’ve been included in the smooshing process, we’ve been taken on a tour of the scale of life on Earth and the scale of human impacts, we’ve been shown how we could turn ourselves around, and we’ve been released from being smooshed to be individuals who feel part of something with immense power – and what if the whole of humanity got a Nobel Prize for turning the fate of the Earth around? Maybe we feel a bit of hope.

Tom and Rob Sears said: 

“It is easy to feel hopeless. We tend to reason that the individual changes we can make are tiny compared to the scale of the crisis. Well, that may be true! But the lesson of the mega human is that when we act together we do have immense power, power to do both harm and good.

As 21st century individualists, it can be hard for us to accept the idea that being a small part of something powerful ‘counts’ as real power. We’re fixated on how much individual control we can exert and we ask ourselves, “Why make a change when the world may crash and burn anyway? Or why vote when my one puny ballot paper almost certainly won’t change the result?”

This isn’t the way to think. The truth is you are part of something powerful whether you like it or not – whether you act or not. The question is which larger force you are going to be a part of.”

My final non-fiction book with heart is The Observologist, by Giselle Clarkson –it’s ‘a Handbook for Mounting Very Small Scientific Expeditions’. This book finds the wonders in the everyday.  The closer you look, the more you see. Nothing is boring. Every creature is busy living & experiencing its own life, with its own hopes and fears, and it feels like something to be it.

 

You can find tiny treasure. There’s usefulness in being bored. This book is funny but also inspires curiosity and a fierce love of nature, and respect for small creatures like the humble woodlouse. And that when you are observing and exploring, you are being a scientist. Clarkson doesn’t shy away from giving you the proper science words for stuff – you are being respected as a scientist who can deal with the real words. 

 

Being a matchbox fan, I particularly liked this spread.

'Just a fantastic creature'

'Golden brown like a marmalade cat'

'

 

 

Keats, in his poem Lamias, complained that “Philosophy (AKA science, especially Newton) will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow..” 

Books like The Observologist show how wrong that is – that every tiny thing gets more interesting the closer you look, that the more you know about the world, the more extraordinary and strange and wonderful the universe and life on Earth become, and everything is interesting.

When I made this Donald Rumfeldt balloon diagram of everything,  I discovered that as your balloon of KNOWN KNOWNS gets bigger, its skin – the membrane that is KNOWN UNKNOWNS gets bigger too – so the more you know, the more you realise there is to know – and this is a good and exciting thing.

Mary Anning had no idea of Darwin’s big idea, she lived too early. In her time, creation was all made by God, and animals were all separate creations – humans most separate of all.

Darwin’s great idea, sketched in a notebook – was that everything is related, it is all linked together in a tree of life: we are woven together and related to everything and everyone else who has ever lived on earth, from bacteria to sponges to sharks to tigers to humans. The fact that we’re alive on this improbable, beautiful, vanishingly rare, precious pale blue dot of a planet is a miracle, an impossible wonder.

 

 

 Mini's latest book is The Greatest Show on Earth, published by Puffin.